1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to managing healthcare information. In particular, the invention relates to a distributed system for managing healthcare information across different platforms.
2. Description of the Related Art
The exchange of electronic healthcare information over networks is increasing. The electronic healthcare information is exchanged between medical offices and other physicians, local hospitals and clinics, location and national labs and imaging centers, insurance payers, local pharmacies, public health and government agencies and patients. This type of collaboration requires the practice to engage in numerous healthcare transactions with many different people and organizations. These transactions include ordering and scheduling tests and obtaining results, referring and consulting on patients with other providers, obtaining authorization and filing claims with insurance payers and prescribing and refilling medications. Physicians and their staff are frequently on the phone, at the fax machine and on the Internet performing collaborative exchanges. Some of the cost associated with these exchanges would be reduced if more of the communications were performed electronically.
Previous attempts to overcome these problems suffer from deficiencies. For example, some physicians have created electronic medical records (EMRs), however, the physicians typically maintain an internal system and if they do exchange information it is only with hospitals, payers, labs and pharmacies. Thus, the physicians are missing an opportunity for a larger exchange of information.
Health information exchanges (HIEs) are appearing in many communities, however, they lack widespread acceptance and their focus is on creating comprehensive, patient-centric records and not on enhancing clinical workflow for physician practices.
Other solutions suffer from deficiencies that prevent them from being adopted by physicians. For example, most software is insufficient or too immature to meet the broad range of collaborative needs of a physician practice. In addition, the costs of adopting the technology, both for the licensing and the expense of re-engineering the practice, are often considered too great. Lastly, the existing systems fail to match the established workflow that the physicians and staff are accustomed to performing. As a result, the existing system must be restructured, which requires manual intervention by the staff to complete the process.